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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      As long as the hamster over there survives, and he&amp;#039;s going like Usain Bolt at this point, we will keep bloggin&amp;#039; the storm out here. As it happens, as I was driving home this morning from Manchester, N.H., I was listening on the electric satellite radio to my man Chuck Todd and his &amp;quot;SuperStorm SuperPanel,&amp;quot; and there was general agreement that the president should, you know, be president until this all blows over and that Willard Romney would not lower himself to take partisan campaign advantage of this unfortunate weather event. Remembering that it took Willard about 11 seconds to politicize the killing of an American ambassador, I was not optimistic on that score. And, of course, the SuperStorm SuperPanel had not reckoned with all the well-financed centers of wingnut power to which Willard could subcontract the job of being a political dick while the East Coast blew off in the general direction of the Dakotas. And the centers of wingnut powers, when it comes to budget cuts and discretionary spending, well, they surely are up to the job these days. There are two lessons in this, the second deriving completely from the first, and I&amp;#039;m not sure that the president fully has learned either one of them yet.  Lesson The First: nothing, n-o-t-h-i-n-g, is beneath these people in pursuit of political advantage and political power. The barrel has no bottom to scrape any more. The proper job of a modern Republican candidate like Willard Romney is to frown ruefully when the barbarians come out to play, but to profit completely from whatever wreckage they leave behind. The man is still running that ad for Richard Mourdock. You think he&amp;#039;d be doing it if he didn&amp;#039;t think there was something in it for him? Lesson The Second: Because of Lesson The First, there is no compromise, no modus vivendi, to be reached with these people in which any reasonable person would bestow an ounce of faith. Sequestration was a jerry-rigged attempt to keep the government functioning because the Republicans in the Congress blew up two previous compromises \u2014 the SuperCommittee and the debt-ceiling, the latter a compromise that had held for decades before we elected a Congress full of vandals in 2010. Now, because the president agreed to the sequestration deal, the conservatives will beat him over the head with the details of it and hope that nobody remembers what the whole thing was about. These people are within spitting distance of controlling the government. Just thought I&amp;#039;d mention that before the hamster dies. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16438/budget-sequestration-deal-14227903/>